Greetings from the Multilingual Sprint at Drupal Dev Days, Barcelona

I was supposed to get into Barcelona at 10:30PM on Tuesday evening, but with delays in my flight, it wasn’t till after midnight that our plane landed; it was after 1 a.m. by the time I reached my hotel. Normally travel, when it runs late and long, makes me feel exhausted, but I was excited to be joining my first Drupal core sprint. I’ve been wanting to do a bit more to help build Drupal and it’s great to not only be somewhat aware of what’s coming in Drupal 8, but to also know that I’ve at least played a small part in making it happen.

I wasn’t sure I would attend the Drupal Dev Days in Barcelona till a couple of weeks ago, but I’m glad I’m here. We have a fairly sizable group of developers here at the Citilab helping work on cutting through the issues for Drupal 8 Multilingual Initiative (D8MI). I’ve been helping with some user interface quirks and since it had been long enough since I’d actually done string translations of the user interface, I started out yesterday as a “tester”… at least trying to look at the problem of translating the interface (e.g. translating “Add content” to German) as if I had never done anything like that before. And we did find some issues and, even better, we were able to address and correct those issues during yesterday’s coding. Others have been working on multilingual issues related to the new configuration management system, and a number of other issues which you, too, can help with, if you’d like to join us remotely (or in person, if you happen to already be in Barcelona — the Sprints continue through Friday, too). There are currently about 40 of us in the IRC channel for i18n and I'd say that at least half of those are working on the Sprint. There are about a dozen (give or take, since people are working on other sprints, too) who are here in Barcelona working on D8MI.

You can help make Drupal 8 better, too!

Jump on IRC (#drupal-i18n) and look at the focus issues for Drupal 8 Multilingual Initiative if you’d like to join use remotely. There is a lot going on right now and it’s not all on Multilingual issues, so if you have some time, I’d like to encourage others to join me in helping ease the burden on the few who do so much and at least do a small bit to make Drupal 8 as awesome as it can be.